Here's your chance to support self-diagnosis on the web! Enough people have tried to get me to diagnose them on-line that I figure that you all have about the same chance of being right as I do!

So I spent last week on the north coast of PNG, a highly endemic malarius area. I didn't take any malaria prevention medicine. I'm a doctor after all, the mosquitoes should know to leave me alone. I didn't really see many mosquitoes.

This afternoon I lifted. I felt sort of puny, so decided not to push DL hard. It was the day for light squats, and I indulged in my new interest, hang cleans, but didn't go very heavy. I felt pretty good when I left the gym. By late evening I was feeling pretty tired and achy, and went to bed early (for me) about 10:30. I guess I dozed a bit, but around 11:30 I was wide awake, feeling cold, though I knew the room wasn't cold. I started into what turned out to be about a half-hour of strong shivering. My temperature during that time was normal. I took a warm bath, the shivering went away, I went back to bed, but couldn't sleep. I feel a little hot right now, but I'm not going to take my temp again, because I'd have to walk all the way to the bathroom to get the thermometer, and besides, that would make the diagnosis too easy for you. I still feel achy, partly in the places that you'd expect from the cleans, a bit of all over.

In the morning I'll have one of our lab people come to the house and draw blood for a malaria smear and a malaria rapid serology test. That may or may not determine the true answer. In the meantime, you can vote!

I actually had something very similar happen to me shortly after a training session.

I started getting cold sweats, body aches covering my entire body and I could barely walk I was in so much pain.

I went out drinking that night, because it was planned that me and my friends were partying. I took about 7 shots in 30 minutes and stopped sweating entirely, at this point I felt so hot I had to have a temp of 103ish. About 5 minutes later I started sweating profusely and felt great.

I woke up the next day, even though I had drank considerably, feeling like a million bucks. No sickness, no hangover.

The moral of the story? Get drunk, asap. Everything will be better in the morning.

From your description above, I was about 90% sure it was not malaria. You just were not sick enough. You can't be certain though because sometimes a person can catch something like that and just shrug it off.

From your description above, I was about 90% sure it was not malaria. You just were not sick enough. You can't be certain though because sometimes a person can catch something like that and just shrug it off.

Well, when I was in the throes of the rigors Tuesday night you wouldn't have been able to convince me that I wasn't sick enough! But you're probably right.

Yes Doc. We care. We are giving you hell because we care. I even said a little prayer for you. After reading that your tests were negative I felt that it was okay to make my rigor mortis comment (I've been out of pocket and wasn't able to get online).

Yes Doc. We care. We are giving you hell because we care. I even said a little prayer for you. After reading that your tests were negative I felt that it was okay to make my rigor mortis comment (I've been out of pocket and wasn't able to get online).

Thank you.

I thought there for a minute that I'd have a really interesting disease, and could get a lot of attention and pity for it. Instead it just petered out and faded away, so I had to milk it a little. But I think about what it could have been. For the rest of my life I could say things like "when I had falciparum malaria back in 2010...." It's not just the same to say "back in 2010, when I THOUGHT I had malaria...."

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